Seven Types of Ambiguity Page 6

  “I’ve told you. It’s not all that crap you see in the movies. I don’t dress up in a uniform or any shit like that. Well, not for him. He’s just one of those guys who spends every day talking nonstop about things that don’t matter to people he doesn’t like or people he’s afraid of. He knows he can say anything to me. It’s pretty common with the regulars. It’s all part of it.”

  Simon wasn’t listening. “He’ll be another only child—lonely,” he said, pouring another drink.

  “Who?”

  “Sam.”

  “Yes, an only child in a broken home.”

  “A broken home—what’s that, Angel? It’s just a cliché. Anyway, she won’t leave him. She knows when she’s on a good thing.”

  “He doesn’t think so. He thinks she’ll have an affair.”

  “For Christ’s sake, what do you two do—undress each other very slowly so there’s time enough to speculate on her fidelity? I hope you charge him extra for the analysis.”

  She ignored him and spoke very deliberately. “He told me he thinks there’s someone else. She’s going away next week to some conference or convention or something.”

  “Oh, he’s crazy, paranoid. He’s really crazy. You’re both crazy. People go away to conventions all the time. Even teachers do these days, or used to. He’s just trying to assuage his guilt, or maybe it turns him on talking about it with you.”

  “Simon, will you relax. So what if she’s going away with someone? It’s his problem, not yours.”

  “This is just part of the shit he spins you, Angel. You don’t believe it?”

  She stood up and met his eyes. “He said he’d leave her if she’s seeing someone else.”

  Simon realizes that maybe the penny has dropped for your husband—that your marriage is in trouble and that you’ve just found out. What kind of man is he? Will he try to save it or will he put on a brave face? Is putting on a brave face the only way he thinks he can save it? Or will he leave you?

  Bravery. For better or for worse, men usually give it up after adolescence. Well, it’s not really bravery at all, is it? It’s a kind of childish pride that we, as a society, tend to idealize. We imbue our screen heroes with it, this “cool.” And isn’t it seductive—this apparent absence of vulnerability? It works. Don’t women want to be desired by someone who doesn’t feel pain, who isn’t afraid?

  But it’s an act. Anybody who doesn’t want or need something is dead. And anyone who does need something can be hurt. They can be afraid. We teach men this act, to perform it all the time. And subsequent to their emancipation, women now have to pretend too. But your husband is so well conditioned he’s not aware it’s an act. He’s been doing it all his life. That’s how he attracted you in the first place and, after years of marriage to you, he’s still playing invulnerable. But is he right to? Is the only truly happy marriage one of detachment and respect? Your husband needs you so badly that he won’t talk to you in the hope that you’ll respect him all the more for his silence. What if he did talk to you? What if he told you the truth? He sometimes cries at the movies and he flirts with the fifteen-year-old girl at the dry cleaner’s? He thinks the men that service his car break some new part every chance they get. When he can’t open a window in your house at the first attempt, he contemplates his mortality. He regrets opening a joint account with you. He wants you to watch him when your sister is around. He’s not totally comfortable with the fact that your father is Italian. His eyebrows displease him, they always have and, on the rare occasions that it’s relevant, sometimes he hastily stimulates himself secretly in the bathroom before going to bed with you so that he might stay the course for you.

  It’s hard to be certain exactly where Angelique’s fondness for your husband stops and her desire to taunt Simon with him starts. She is certainly fond of him. He makes her feel needed with his confessions and, as you can see, because of his confessions, Simon also makes her feel needed. For as long as Simon is obsessed with you, there will always be a place where your husband will be welcome. But if Simon were well, if he had a job, if he could forget about you and rejoin the nine-to-five rate-paying dinner-party guests, the commuters, the opinion polled, if he were somebody’s target market—where would Angelique and your husband be? And where would you be? Where will you be if you do leave him? Will Sam finally catch a first glimpse of some exhausted rapprochement between you and your by then ex-husband at his twenty-first birthday, just before the speeches when, as you stand together, you look honestly at this man with a shame you could never bear to put into words, a shame that only hindsight can deliver? And in the light of what your husband has become since you left him, in the light of his fall, will you regret your inability to say, “I’m sorry I was not there to catch you”?

  13. The need or striving for a sense of control is generally considered healthy. People’s behavior is often determined, to a large extent, by the amount of personal control the individual believes he or she has. Indeed, clinically depressed people do not attempt to alter their circumstances at all. And the longer they do not attempt to intervene, the greater their problems become. But here is the critical point. To be healthy, it must be their circumstances that they seek to change. There is no merit in attempting to control other people’s lives. I never counseled any kind of Machiavellian desperation. Simon came up with this on his own. In theory, we don’t drum up business.

  Was he looking out at the street through the venetian blinds when reason momentarily turned away from him as though it had become as tired of him as he had himself? Reason has always been an early riser. It’s always the first to leave. To be honest, it was not really a flight from reason so much as a perverse confluence of events. Simon learned from Angelique that your husband had an early meeting nearly every morning, but there was one particular morning that especially interested him, the morning of the day you were to fly out for your conference. If the meeting had been later, Simon could not have left a message for your husband without speaking to him. If Angelique had not woken him for breakfast he might have been too late. But it was all as if it were on some kind of “just in time” schedule.

  Your husband was having a “busy time,” often working late, always starting early. You remember. Why don’t you ever ask anybody questions? Well, I suppose you will now. Think about it. It’s a depressed market. They’re not going to pay people to work those kinds of hours anymore, and you don’t earn a commission if the phone doesn’t ring. There was no busy time at all, except maybe with Angelique, but he did have a breakfast meeting that morning. Simon assures me that one day well-dressed people will start having breakfast at home again. But the dollar had been up to no good while your husband was with Angelique. It went down on him, through the floor, and this necessitated a lot of urgent consultation. There is, apparently, an excess of coffee but a shortage of croissants at these breakfast meetings, Angelique tells us. More important, Simon knew from her exactly when your husband would be unable to receive calls, so he could leave a message for him without the risk of speaking to him, a message ostensibly on your behalf. Your husband could have called you back and been put straight at any time throughout the day. Or you could have really called him, to clarify something or even just to say good-bye again, to say anything. Simon would not have known. He was taking a risk but, when you think about it, what was he really risking? After all, what would have happened if your husband had not received Simon’s message and had arrived at the school in time to pick Sam up?

  As it happened, your husband didn’t call you. He didn’t need to; he had everything straight already—pick up Sam from school, take him to dinner at your parents’, pick him up at lunchtime on Saturday, leave some money out for the housekeeper. The shopping had been done. It was only for a weekend. And you didn’t call him either. Calls during work are kept to a minimum. Instructions are issued in the morning, and they tend not to be queried in the absence of any major ambiguity. You had your briefcase and your overnight bag already packed, sitting in
the trunk of the car at the bottom of the high-rise where you work. You could go directly from drinks to the airport. You weren’t going to call him during the day—not this day.

  Simon has yet another theory about children I haven’t mentioned, theory Number 6,017, which I would say has almost no validity but which, yet again, I found interesting. This one he formulated on the basis of his observations from the perimeter of a school playground, but I don’t think he really accepts it. (It has all the hallmarks of a psychological theory, doesn’t it?) He says that, as a rule of thumb, one can correlate the amount of time a child spends on the school premises after the final bell has rung for the day with the degree of domestic dislocation to which the child is subjected. Why is a child still at school after school hours? If he or she is being detained on account of bad behavior, whom is the child rebelling against, or emulating? If the child is receiving extra tutoring, why is it that he or she isn’t able to learn at the same rate as the others? If he or she is loitering around the grounds after hours, perhaps home is an unpleasant place to be.

  It’s pretty simplistic stuff and, as I said, I don’t think he really believes it. What about after-school sports? And what about art, crafts, music, drama, and smoking behind the bike racks? All of this attracts them to school, for many a cross between a temple and a marketplace. This is where it all happens, and we must be careful not to discount the importance to them of these things merely because we have forgotten about so much that was important to us.

  There are brightly painted red-and-white posts that designate the beginning and end of children’s crossings. Have you noticed how each of these posts subtly comes to a point, but somehow it’s not sharp? We can touch it, a palpable manifestation of our collective anxiety for our children. The wire-mesh fence inclines toward the school building with lush green foliage on the inside of it forming a raised plantation, ideal for jungle warfare and general hiding. The building itself is in different sections. The central part is just over a hundred years old with reddish-brown bricks, white window frames, and a roof of slate tiles rising to a spire. Next to this are extensions such as the library, with much lower roofs and brick of different shades of red reflecting subsequent spasms of public funding.

  There is a sign on the wall of the library just below the gutters that reads: WARNING. KEEP OFF. THIS ROOF HAS A SECURITY CAMERA CONNECTED DIRECTLY TO A SECURITY COMPANY. TRESPASSERS CAN EXPECT IMMEDIATE ARREST. Out of the highest external brick wall comes a two-tiered wooden fire escape leading to an asphalt basketball court. There is an old rusted ring at each end, but no backboards. Do boys play netball? Beside the court is a big green garbage can surrounded by smaller silver trash bins, some of which are chained to each other. Others are dented, having been used at critical times to demarcate one area from another.

  Not far from the bins are the cricket nets, the wire sagging at the ends, and next to them the small concrete field for the teachers’ parking lot. The classrooms are of different sizes, each with a different feel inside according to the age of the class and the age of its teacher. Some have tiny plastic tables facing the blackboard, and wooden chairs with denim and gingham chair bags hanging from them. Others are lined with collages of animals, fashion models, and dairy products. There are charts, “Where Rain Comes From,” “Where the Sun Goes.” Nothing else sounds like the bell and the children spill out on its instruction at a rate that bears no relation to their individuality, which, if you attempt to ignore in any other context, will only confound you further.

  In the seconds before the bell rings, the parents, grandparents, and assorted guardians mill around the fence near the gate. They don’t come in. Some talk; others just wait. It is interesting that children of the same ages are met by adults of such different ages and backgrounds. Young women and much older men, from southern Europe, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia. How old are the children before they refuse to be hugged in front of their peers? How young are they when the accent of a waiting guardian engenders a shame they will, years later, remember with a fresh and much richer shame? Some of the children are not met by anyone. They might walk home alone or in groups. They try each other’s bikes. Perhaps they are going to meet a parent at work? Some of them are in no hurry to end the day’s commerce. They hang around.

  Ball games start, and children of all different sizes are lost to them. There’s a kid with crazy eyes and a big bag of marbles smoothing the ground in front of him. He’s wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a steroid-enriched bodybuilder, naked to the waist, clutching an assault rifle. The kid holds a marble in the air between his thumb and forefinger and calls out, “Hit it and you win it,” in a slow dragging voice as though he were selling papers. The teachers’ parking lot is emptying of its small red, white, and yellow cars. The younger women, fresh from teachers college, are getting into cars decorated with furry cartoon characters wrapped around the rearview mirrors and stickers on the back advertising radio stations now in liquidation and seaside resorts the young women went to with their slightly older young men in bigger cars. The kid with the crazy eyes has a small crowd of boys in front of him. “Hit it and you win it.”

  Sam was thinking about it. He stood with his hands in his pockets watching the other boys, some of them older. His schoolbag was on the ground, and he wasn’t looking for anyone.

  “Sam.”

  He heard his name called but ignored it. He was watching the boys and the marbles. Hit it and you win it.

  “Sam,” Simon called again.

  Sam turned around.

  “Do you remember me?”

  He shook his head.

  “Yes you do. Do you remember that awful day when you fell in the pool at home?”

  “You’re the gardener!” he said.

  “Yes. I’m the gardener. Do you like to play marbles?”

  “Yes. Sometimes,” Sam answered, looking back at the others.

  “Listen—Sam. You know your mum won’t be picking you up today?”

  “Yes. Dad will.”

  “Well, he was going to, Sam, but he can’t now. He’s got something at his work that is going to make him get home late. He asked me to come and tell you that—and to take care of you. Is that okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like chocolate milk? I do.”

  Simon knows about empty school playgrounds, about looking in them for someone, calling out with a dry mouth and a machine-gun pulse. Your husband would have looked everywhere. He would have gone through his pockets looking for the message written by someone else’s secretary, the message from you that Simon had left for him telling him that Sam was on an excursion and would be back late. It wouldn’t have helped anything to have found it, but he would have felt he needed to see it. Without it, he would have wondered whether he had dreamed the whole thing. You can imagine. The walk becomes a nervous trot. Can you picture it? He is still trying to deny what is happening. He loosens his tie and then he runs, unashamedly, in terror. Nothing can prepare him for this. He cries his son’s name to stop the world. You must know all this by now.

  14. Angelique was looking for the expiration date on a packet of drinking chocolate. The cupboard was filled with cans of soup, chocolate, canned fruit, and packets of mashed potato, much of which she had bought for him over the last few months. There were some saucepans in the kitchen sink with the remnants of canned soup congealing on their sides. She was pleased to see this. It showed that he was getting through the supplies. There were some newspapers piled up on the floor and some empty bottles stacked neatly in a row beside the trash can. There were not as many as there used to be.

  “When did you buy this drinking chocolate?” she called to Simon in the living room.

  “He doesn’t want hot chocolate. There’s some chocolate syrup in there somewhere near the front. I bought it yesterday,” he called back.

  “I was making it for us, but if it’s stale I’ll throw it out.”

  “I didn’t know drinking chocolate got sta
le but maybe the new, improved stuff comes with state-of-the-art environmentally vindictive obsolescence. You can’t stop progress, you know . . . can’t stop anything,” he added quietly.

  She boiled some milk to go with the chocolate syrup for two mugs of hot chocolate and poured some more chocolate syrup into a glass with ice cream and milk. There seemed to be so much milk.

  “I don’t know what these will be like. I’ve never made hot chocolate from syrup before,” she said, carrying all three of the drinks into the living room and placing them on the coffee table. The television was on but turned low, almost inaudible. Sam was lying on the carpet with a pillow underneath his head and a blanket over him. Empson was asleep next to him. Angelique sat down next to Simon with her hot chocolate.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked.

  “I’m not certain I do. People who are certain they know what they’re doing are very dangerous. I’m not dangerous.”

  “You’re crazy, Simon. What do you think is going to come of this? Nothing good, you know that.”

  Simon put his mug down and got up to adjust the blanket around Sam. He knelt on the floor and made sure no part of him was uncovered below his chin.

  “Angel, you’re probably right, but as the guy said when he jumped off the Rialto building and got to the twentieth floor: so far, so good.”

  She smiled weakly. Empson sighed. The television showed a police car in a narrow alley. She looked around the room, for so long a cave of inert chaos, now sparely littered with several neat piles of mess, newspapers and books mostly. Her gaze came to rest on Simon with your sleeping son beside him.

  “I want you to know . . . I love you, Simon. I know everything you’ve said. I know I am . . . forewarned, as you say, but please know it—remember it, no matter what. I love you even though . . . I know you’re crazy. You’re the softest man I’ve ever met. Too soft. He’s smarter than you,” she said, pointing to Sam, still sleeping.